<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Death Doesn’t Hurt Much by Pearly_Ashes</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23098375">Death Doesn’t Hurt Much</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pearly_Ashes/pseuds/Pearly_Ashes'>Pearly_Ashes</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Good Omens (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Death, Hellfire, Holy Water, I'm so sorry, M/M, Suicide, the angel wing mug</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 13:08:08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>454</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23098375</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pearly_Ashes/pseuds/Pearly_Ashes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Not when living hurts so much worse.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>40</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Death Doesn’t Hurt Much</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Crowley has often wondered why humans would take their own lives. He’s seen it many times, in every imaginable way. He’s seen them bleed out their wrists, shatter falling onto concrete, silence their ticking minds and hearts with a hunk of lead. <br/>And he wonders why. What could possibly hurt enough to make it worth it? To cut short their already fleeting lives?<br/>Much of the time, the answers are the same. Hate. Regret. Loneliness. And most often of all, love. That fascinating little tic of the heart to pin all your joy and life on another soul. <br/>And still he wonders why. He’s seen so many humans recover from the same sort of circumstances and go on to lead some of the greatest lives he’s ever seen. He wonders, but he never understands.<br/>Until the day he sees his angel burn. The day he watches the one thing that makes his life worth living be engulfed in blazing hellfire and he listens to the laughter of the demons who put it there. The day he kills those same demons, watching the laughter die in their eyes as he rips the hearts out of their corporations and crushes them in his claws. The day he sweeps those same bloodstained claws through the ashes, begging his angel to come back to him, to say it was a trick, or a cruel joke perhaps.<br/>And, oh, now he understands. He understands, and it feels like lead claws wrapped around his heart, and he wishes, more than anything, that he did not understand.<br/>Now he understands, and that is why he stands, wings out and head tipped back toward the stars, on the top of the tallest building he could see nearby. He doesn’t know its name. It doesn’t matter.<br/>In his hand, there’s a mug, tiny ceramic angel wings serving as its handle. Anyone who frequented the bookshop of A. Z. Fell would recognize it as belonging to the owner. <br/>It’s filled with water. <br/>Crowley flies, up, up as high as he can go without feeling the pain of being too close to heaven, then he lifts the mug in a last toast to the world. No one is there to toast it with him. He drinks.<br/>And he falls.<br/>Londoners that day reported seeing an odd sight, something in the sky blazing like a shooting star in the daytime. <br/>And when the building that was Aziraphale’s bookshop is being cleaned out to be sold, there is an odd pile of dusty ashes in the room, with a black feather, that must have blown in an open window, laying on top.<br/>And somewhere, a demon knows now, that death doesn’t hurt much, compared to being alone.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>